As several African governments examine the possibility of setting up their own 'offshore' financial centres, the trade name for tax havens, campaigners are calling for transparency and fair tax regimes.

Middle East countries have seen the largest increase of illicit outflows of funds to richer nations, depriving the developing nations of much needed development money, a new international report shows.

Football, the most popular sport in Colombia, has been subject to heavy pressures from drug trafficking since the mid-1970s. A new study shows that the illicit trade continues to tarnish the upper echelons of this sport.

'It sounds incredible, but it's just a matter of a letter that wasn't turned in on time,' Ecuador's attorney general said in regards to the Financial Action Task Force decision to qualify the country as 'posing a risk to the international financial system.'

New cases of tax evasion in several European countries are showing the limits of the informal agreements reached between the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and tax havens such as Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.

Numerous failures by industrialised countries’ governments and central banks in managing the financial crisis are feeding the next bubble, which most likely will again provoke economic woes such as recession, unemployment, and poverty, according to economists and analysts.

Illegal capital flight in the form of corrupt, criminal and illicit commercial proceeds out of developing economies could be as high as one trillion dollars a year. Not only does it dwarf the 50 billion dollars in development assistance that rich countries disburse annually but it is largely facilitated by the western financial system of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions.

'One way of ensuring the future of journalism is to improve content quality, and this means investigating what is deliberately hidden, like corruption,' said Gerardo Reyes, a reporter for the Miami newspaper El Nuevo Herald, on a visit to the Peruvian capital.

Governmental corruption and the refusal to cooperate with U.S. counter-drug efforts are worsening a ballooning drug trafficking problem in Venezuela, according to a new report by the investigative office of the U.S. Congress.

At a recent conference in Miami organised by Offshore Alert, a specialised media organisation focused on financial crime, IPS correspondent Lucy Komisar sat down with veteran investigator Bob Roach to discuss the hurdles facing regulators trying to crack down on tax havens, which cost the U.S. alone an estimated 100 billion dollars annually.